Writing Observations

Writer's Realizations

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WOW. So, it turns out that writing 7 days a week for a year and a half is possibly more than I can handle when it's something I'm forcing myself to do. 

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It's a lot easier when I'm not forcing it, but when I turn it into a source of pressure? Nope, not good for me. 

Going forward, I'm going to dive back into writing regularly, but this time I'm not going to try to maintain a 7 days a week schedule. 

From now on, I take at least  one day a week off, likely on the weekend some time, and I will maintain the option of a second day as well. Probably also on the weekend.

I guess everyone needs to decompress a bit. 

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The Joys of Live-Publishing

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​Oh the fun I have. The other night when I published the latest update to The Price of Entanglement,​ I described a minor character, Midori, as being Japanese.

This is the sort of thing that happens when I write really, really late at night (or in the morning, as the case may be,) and am very tired and not paying enough attention.​

All of the Prices stories take place in a fictional world that bears some close resemblances to our own, but they're developmental and cultural similarities, n​ot geographical or political similarities. There is no Japan in this world. Midori is supposed to evoke someone of Asian origin, but she can't actually be from Japan, unless I start going all alternate-dimensional. (I don't plan to do this. At least not with these stories.)

​I noticed this while writing today's delayed update to the story. When I next collect chapters, the correction will have been made.

This is what makes writing in other worlds both fun and challenging. I have total freedom to create whatever I want, but then I become responsible for not only maintaining the consistency of the world, but also of ensuring I don't start accidentally blending worlds together, be it a fictional world with the real world, or two fictional worlds that aren't supposed to touch.

Onward with the story!​

Editing The Ship of the Unremembered

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Camp NaNoWriMo I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.

Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.

For the Win

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Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.

Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.

What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.

Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.